104 - The Diary of a Drug Fiend
through the plains of Lombardy. Odd fragments of
Shelley’s lines on the Euganean hills flitted through my
mind like azure or purple phantoms. :
“The vaporous plain of Lombardy
Islanded with cities fair.”’
A century had commercialised the cities for the
most part into cockpits and cesspools. But Shelley
still shone serene as the sun itself.
“Many a green isle needs must be
In this wide sea of misery.” ,
Everything he had touched with his penhad blossomed
into immortality. And Lou and I were’ living in the
land which his prophetic eyes had seen. ©
I thought of that incomparable idyll, I will not call it
an island, to which he invites Emilia, in Epipsychidion.
Lou and I, my love and I, my wife and I, we were not
merely going there;- we had always been there and
should always be. For the name of the island, the
name of the house, the name of Shelley, and the name
of Lou and me, they were all one name—Love.
“ The wingéd words with which my song would pierce
Into the heights of love’s rare universe
_ Are chains of lead about its flight of fire,
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. ”
I noticed, in fact, that our physical selves seemed
to be acting as projections of our thought. We were
both breathing rapidly and deeply. Our faces were
flushed, suffused with the sunlight splendour of our
bloods that beat time to the waltz of our love. |
Waltz? No, it was something wilder than a waltz.
The Mazurka, perhaps. No, there was something
still more savage in our souls. :
I thought of the furious fandango of the gipsies of